Flowglad is built on a few core principles. Understanding these will help make sense of our product and API. It will also help you understand why we’re building Flowglad, and what inspires our craft.

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Source of Truth

Flowglad is designed to be the source of truth for all your billing and payments. When you use Flowglad, you shouldn’t need to maintain any billing state in your application. We manage your customers’ subscription plans, prices, discount redemptions, trial periods, (and soon usage).

When you need this data, you can query from the Flowglad API. You no longer need to maintain a second copy of your billing data in your application. You no longer need to keep your data in sync with your billing and payments provider.

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Teleological

Flowglad takes the responsibility of “getting billing right” off your plate, regardless of your business model. To do this, we strongly recommend you take advantage of our SDKs. We have a REST API, but it’s unlikely that you’ll want to use it directly, even via one of our REST clients. This is deliberate: REST APIs do not give you a sense of direction. There’s no clear “and then this step” with REST APIs.

Rather than requiring you to learn our REST API, we’ve created a set of SDKs that make it easy to do whatever it is you need done. The SDKs ship with functions whose purpose is intuitive and obvious. They allow us to describe operations the way you think about them.

Flowglad’s opinionation means you don’t have to worry about the many footguns awaiting you in billing and payments.

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From Your Perspective

Flowglad’s is designed to allow you to reason about billing and payments, from your perspective rather than ours.

Most approaches to billing to date have focused on the API. But that only gets you JSON payloads. You’re left to make sense of them and deliver them where they need to go.

Flowglad aims to solve the deeper job to be done: getting billing data with the meaning you understand, in the form factor you need, at the time and location where you need it.

This approach results in a smaller integration footprint that works more closely to the way thought it would, and leaves you less to maintain as your application grows.

This principle has driven three major design decisions to date:

  • You define and access customer billing data in terms of your customer id, not ours
  • We identify your customers based on your application’s authentication
  • SDK-first, rather than REST-API first

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Good Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the study of controlling and managing complex systems. At its core, billing, pricing and payments logic is a cybernetic problem. You don’t just have customer payment data to manage. You also have pricing logic, entitlements (which plans unlock access to what features), and a myriad of other things to reason about. Inevitably you will need to manage your answers to these questions over the axis of time.

When you update your pricing, you have to decide how or whether to migrate existing customers. When you give a new customer bespoke terms, you have to reason about where the store the exceptions to their pricing policy, and possibly the features they can uniquely access. Your billing data will need to agree with your accounting and application logic.

Getting this right is very, very hard. As pricing models grow more complex, layering in upsells, team billing, and usage based pricing - the cybernetic problem gets harder and harder. It’s a very common and painful form of technical debt. And it impacts more than just engineering: it creates a drag on your accounting, sales and marketing.

Our goal is to solve the billing cybernetic problem once and for all.